The weakness of age is the penalty paid by the folly of youth. The attitudes set in the early years continue to color how we experience work during the rest of our lives. On the job, people tend to use their mind and body to its fullest, and consequently feel that what they do is important, and feel good about themselves while doing it. Yet their motivation is worse than when they are at home, and so is the quality of their moods. Despite huge differences in salary, prestige, and freedom, managers tend to feel only somewhat more creative and active on the job, while clerical and assembly-line workers are no unhappier and dissatisfied. Everyone tends to experience work in the same way. A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Traditionally, identity and self-respect have been based on the ability to obtain energy from the environment for ourselves and our families’ use. Whether the satisfaction an individual gets from doing a necessary job is partly genetically programmed, or is entirely learned from the culture, the fact is that more or less everywhere both men and women are now providers for their household. Civil rights have made it perfectly normal for both genders to be police officers, firefighters, lawyers, doctors, and engineers. 

And it is also becoming more common for men to share in the responsibility of taking care of the child, and we are actually seeing more fathers choose to become househusbands. In fact, 21 percent of men now stay at home to manage the house and child(ren), which is up from just 5 percent in 1989. Both men and women’s self-esteem is strongly attached to what happens to their families. Having a destitute parent or a child who has trouble in school is much greater load on their minds than whatever can happen at work. The double jeopardy that a family and a career impose can be a heavy burden on the self-esteem of people. However, most people still enjoy working for pay than they do staying at home because when a person is earning money, they feel like they are accomplishing more and expect more from themselves, and have the ability to support the house and money to buy what they want without depending on anyone else. When you have to stay at home and have a budget to live on, and are not paid for the work you do in the house, no matter how many hours you put in, you still have to complete your job and still have the same budget to maintain. These issues bring into focus why cleaning the house, cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, fixing things around the house and balancing the checkbook might sometimes produce negative experiences in a person’s day. However, work can also be challenging. Although you are working for pay, you have to spend a certain number of hours in the office, take breaks at certain times, and are made to interact with people you may not like and hear things you may not want to hear, and you also get performance reviews. 

So, no matter how you feel about your job or how tired you are, one must always produce excellent work and be in a relatively good mood. You cannot ditch the guy at the water cooler, who is always waiting around to gossip, instead you have to find a friendly way of telling him that you are busy and hope he catches on. You may not like the overly enthusiastic guy, who works on the same floor as you, seems to take breaks at the same time of you and goes to the bathroom when you do, but you have to still be pleasant. And if you are tired, you cannot just fall asleep at your desk and recklessly complete a project. There are many high expectations to earning a paycheck. In a recent survey, 83 percent of executives, 77 percent of middle level employees, and 61 percent of the unemployed reported that they were satisfied with their lives. So it seems that people who are employed and tend to earn more money are more satisfied with their lives. Perhaps that is because they more than likely are doing jobs they were highly trained for. Nonetheless, without the goal and the challenges usually provided by a job, only a rare self-discipline can keep the mind focused intensely enough to insure a meaningful life. 

When we look at flow in the lives of adults, one finds more occasions of it on the job than in free time. Now, remember, flow does not mean you are happy in the moment, it just means you are doing something you find important and that adds to your self-esteem. Them moments when a person is in a high-challenge, high-skill situation, accompanied by feelings of concentration, creativity, and satisfaction, were reported more often at work than at home. Work is like a game that we do during the day, it usually has clean goals and rules of performance. It provides feedback either in the form of knowing that one has finished a job well done, in terms of measurable sales, or through evaluation by one’s supervisor. A job usually encourages concentration and prevents distractions; it also allows a variable amount of control, and—at least ideally—its difficulties match the worker’s skills. Thus work tends to have the structure of other intrinsically rewarding activities that provide flow, such as games, sports, music, and art. In comparison, much of the rest of life lacks these elements. When spending time at home with the family or alone, people often lack clear purpose, do not know how well they are doing, are distracted, feel that their skills are underutilized, and as a result feel bored, worthless, sad, or anxious. So it is no wonder that the quality of experience at work is generally better than one would expect.